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Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology

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Agent Plus and Practical Reasoner: A Comparative Study of the Ethical Person
Ulrich Demmer
a a

Munich University, Germany Published online: 02 Sep 2013.

To cite this article: Ethnos (2013): Agent Plus and Practical Reasoner: A Comparative Study of the Ethical Person, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2013.817461 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2013.817461

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Agent Plus and Practical Reasoner: A Comparative Study of the Ethical Person

Ulrich Demmer
Munich University, Germany

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abstract This paper explores an understanding of the person in terms of practical reason. Based on my eldwork among the Jenu Kurumba and on ethnographic data on four other communities, I analyse how these ve communities conceptualise the ethical person. To understand these concepts, I consult studies of an anthropology of ethics concerned with practical reason. Additionally I draw on Charles Taylors concept of the agent plus and Alasdair MacIntyres notion of the practical reasoner. I argue that both Neo-Aristotelian notions are fundamentally important for understanding the concepts of the ethical person among the ve cultural formations investigated in this paper. keywords Concepts of person, anthropology of ethics, practical reason, ethical agency, South India Introduction n anthropology of ethics is concerned with ideals, values, models, practices, relationships, and institutions, to the degree that people attempt to shape their lives with reference to these ethics (Laidlaw 2002: 327). In particular, an anthropology of ethics studies how people live up to virtues and to the most highly valued ideas cultivated in and through their cultural or religious traditions. It also explores practices that Foucault calls techniques of the self (1997: 223), namely, the practices of making oneself into a certain kind of person (Laidlaw 2002: 322). Last but not least, it is concerned with how people explicitly imagine and articulate the ways one ought to live and how they imagine and argue for the best way of living a good and ourishing life. In contrast to other branches of anthropology, which assume, usually implicitly, that culture, society, and community are based on modes of

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traditional reason, of objective cultural and social reason, or even of theoretical reason, an anthropology of ethics starts with the assumption that actors are ethical persons who employ practical reason to answer the questions posed above. However, while anthropological studies of ethics have recently taken initial steps to investigate practical reason1 the question of how to appropriately conceptualise the ethical person remains almost unexplored. It belongs, in fact, to a set of other concepts key to an anthropology of ethics, such as self, care, breakdown, reason, freedom, or value, whose main outlines, as Robbins recently noted, have yet to become wholly clear (2012: 117). The present essay contributes to overcoming one of these obstacles. The rst part of this article explores an understanding of a person in terms of ethical agency.2 To this end, I draw on the recent anthropological studies of ethics and their ndings concerning practical reason. However, as the comparative analysis shows, there are other important features of practical reason, such as strong evaluation, the dialogic quality of ethical agency, its existential signicance for human identity or its rhetorical and negotiated character that have not yet been sufciently recognised. These elements are key to the concepts of the ethical person developed in a certain strand of Neo-Aristotelian moral philosophy,3 namely, the notion of agent plus (Taylor 1989) and practical reasoner (MacIntyre 1999). I argue that both notions are fundamentally important for an understanding of the ethical person, at least among the ve communities analysed in this article.4 The second part of this article presents the comparative study. The analysis draws on my own eldwork with the Jenu Kurumba5 and on ethnographic data from four other cultural communities. Since an anthropology of ethics did not explicitly study concepts of the ethical person until now the ethnographies of these communities provide the best data for my purpose. Practical Reason and the Ethical Person A key faculty of the ethical person is practical reason.6 Practical reason answers the question, how ought one live? (Bernard Williams quoted in Laidlaw 2002: 311) or how to live in the best way? What exactly does that faculty entail?7 Many studies explicitly concerned with an anthropology of ethics draw on virtue ethics and conceive a practical reason in terms of the Aristotelian notion of phronesis. Phronesis is employed in processes where actors cultivate and hone their virtuous behaviour and the moral character of the person according to ideal standards and values. However, this process does not go without saying but [. . .] requires judgment of particular circumstances, delibethnos, 2013 (pp. 1 26)

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eration over correct means, and intentional initiation of actions (Lambek 2000: 316). In short, this process requires phronesis as practical wisdom and ethical deliberation. Inspired by MacIntyre, fascinating work has been done on the relationship of ethical reasoning and virtue (e.g. Robbins 2004; Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006; Pandian 2009; Widlok 2012). Equally important is Foucaults notion of problematisation or thought. Used most explicitly by Laidlaw (1993, 2002) and Faubion (2001, 2010), the terms are part of what Foucault has called technologies of the self.8 These are the ways the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self (1997: 291). Understood in this way, thought essentially entails reection on the relationship between self and ethical values. Foucault (1997: 117) writes: Thought
is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reects on it as a problem.

Another vital feature of practical reason is poiesis. The term refers to the creative production of meanings and to what Faubion calls the ethical imaginary (2001: 95). It indicates that ethical meanings are often poetically created through the use of gurative speech and symbolic action. Accordingly Lambek (2000: 311) writes that for an understanding of ethics poiesis, in the sense of the structures, principles, and acts of creative production, is critical. He refers to Fernandez and Tambiah whose work on gures of speech demonstrates the power of poiesis and whom one may loosely group together as Aristotelian in inspiration (Lambek 2000. On poiesis see also Demmer & Gaenszle 2007). So far we have outlined what one might call with Lambek (2010b) the immediate and the prospective character of practical reason. However, as he and Laidlaw (2010a) note, practical reason is also retrospective in the sense that it entails responsibility and acknowledging what has been done for what was and is (Lambek 2010b: 43). The retrospective aspect thus points to the responsive character of practical reason. Responsivity is concerned with the past behaviour and it also implies processes of listening. Listening plays a key role in Foucaults technologies of the self as a precondition for the acquisition of ethical knowledge. It is important to recognise though that listening is not simply a process of getting

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informed but an ethical activity that requires the attentive and culturally informed responsivity of listeners. Among members of Islamic reform movements in Cairo, for example, the practice of listening to tape-recorded sermons is a means to ethical improvement (Hirschkind 2001: 632). Another related and well-studied element of practical reason is narrativity. It is relevant to all three contexts: immediate, prospective, and retrospective. It is a key mode of moral reasoning and is employed in processes of social memory, argumentation, or narration. Storytelling, for example, motivates the narrator and/or the audience to remember key virtues (Prasad 2007; Zigon 2011, 2012). Narratives are also employed in family conversations or in ritual discourses to negotiate the moral relationships of speakers, argue about their social history, or debate the nature of a good life and a good community (Demmer 2001, 2007; see also Lambek 2012). Last but not least narrativity and social memory play an important role in the transformation of the self through the technologies-ofthe-self. Foucault (cf. 1997: 223ff) has analysed this process for ancient Greece and the early Christianity and the comparative analysis below presents further examples of that aspect. If practical reason is no formal procedure it is not a purely cognitive-intellectual faculty either but entails emotional processes as well. The cassette-sermons studied by Hirschkind among an Islamic revival movement in Cairo, Egypt, for example, are explicitly shaped to evoke in the sensitive listener a particular set of ethical sentiments. Foremost among them are fear (khauf), humility (khusto), regret (nadm), repentance (tauba), and tranquillity (itmi nan or sakina) (Hirschkind 2001: 627). Emotions are the affective dispositions that endow a believers heart with the capacities of moral discrimination necessary for proper conduct (Hirschkind 2001). Feelings and experiences like pain and suffering can also constitute what Throop (2010) has called moral sentiments. Interpreted with reference to particular cultural schemes they can motivate, for example, among Yap (Micronesia), ethical attitudes like compassion and care. In fact, many cultures (see below) explicitly recognise that ethical reason combines thought and emotions. They conceptualise the ethical faculty, for example, in terms of what Catherine Lutz translates as thought/emotion (1988: 92) or what Uni Wikan has called feeling-thought (1990: 35ff). These terms denote a moral capability where emotional and intellectual features are closely geared to each other (1990: 35ff). Another aspect of ethical agency is that it cannot be fully understood with the two major models of action offered by social theory. Social theory usually distinguishes between fully self-determined and free activities on the one
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hand, and determined, rule- or norm-guided activities on the other. As Faubion (2001: 94) notes the ethical eld certainly includes choice, but it also reveals an array of human activities that are neither deliberative nor driven. In addition, ethical behaviour is an activity in which the peculiar dynamics of thought interpose itself between reaction and action Accordingly, Faubion (2001: 94) recommends extricating ourselves from the dilemmas of decisionism and determinism. Lambek (2000: 314) also recognises the theoretical dilemma that ethical life cannot be understood as simple conformity to a set of rules nor is it the naive freedom of liberal individualism. Because it rests on judgement and phronesis it transcends a divide between freedom and obligation (Lambek 2010a: 28).9 How then shall we conceive of ethical agency action if the usual models do not apply? Lambek gives us a hint in noting that we engage in a continuous ne-tuning of our actions to suit our understanding of the context and circumstances in order to achieve the general aim of human ourishing (2000: 314). However, what that means in terms of action theory is left open and I will address this issue below. The features outlined above constitute central aspects of practical reason. However, these elements do not exhaust the scope of ethical agency nor do these studies explicitly show how these aspects constitute the ethical person. As the comparative analysis in the present article demonstrates, the ethical person is often characterised by additional features, such as strong evaluation whereby people dene what is most desirable, dialogicity, the existential nexus of ethics and identity, the fundamental role of the articulation of values through language and discourse, and, last but not least, joint action and its negotiated or rhetorical character. Taken together these elements account for what Taylor (1989) has termed the engaged character of practical reason and characterise the person as an agent plus or what MacIntyre has called a practical reasoner. In the following I will briey outline these concepts. Agent Plus and Practical Reasoner In his paper What is human agency?, Taylor (1985a) outlines the basic features of the moral persons agency. In his view, the human being is best conceived of as what he calls an agent plus. The person is not simply a goal-oriented actor but also someone who evaluates and reects upon actions and objectives. Most important, the person evaluates strongly in the sense that a hierarchy of values is established among the many possible objectives of conduct. Moreover, ethical orientation based on strong evaluation is indispensable for personal identity. Without a direction towards the good,
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the person would not know where to go, how to act, or how to lead her/his life. In other words, identity and evaluation are inseparably connected and existentially necessary. The moral person also needs to articulate and acquire these value orientations through a language of values, and always does so in exchange with others and in narrative or discursive forms (cf. Taylor 1985a, 1985b). This is only possible if the person draws on a cultural horizon or background providing the moral ontologies that also serve to justify and legitimatise values, virtues, and images of what counts as a good life. Eventually, the person must also choose which way to go, how to behave, and what type of life she/he wants to live. To be a human being means to take a position in ethical space. Ethical agency is thus an engaged activity of not only evaluation or moral deliberation but also dialogue and communication with others. Ethical agency is the articulation of values and substantial notions of the good and of what a good life is all about. In short the agent plus is a dialogic self (cf. Taylor 1991). MacIntyre (1984, 1999) conceptualises ethical agency in similar terms. For him the application of practical reason and the ways of learning of how to apply practical reason constitute the basic conditions of human life. Accordingly, the person is what he calls a practical reasoner throughout life. In this view, using practical reason is the indispensable task of the human being because a good human life is always experienced as being endangered, vulnerable, and at stake, such that its renewal and the question of how to live well and ourish is unavoidable. The answers to this open question demand a faculty for reecting on our deeds and most importantly on the appropriateness and worth of our desires, wishes, and objectives in life. Moreover, appropriate answers require articulating a language or narrative of goods that outlines which goods are regarded as most worthwhile to cultivate and to practise in life. MacIntyre states that human ourishing is always and unavoidably a question of evaluating goods for their appropriateness with respect to that objective. In short, we may state that ethical deliberation is what counts as a precondition and resource for all human life. Although the person is required to deliberate values for himself/herself through inner dialogue, it cannot answer the ethical question alone and strictly by itself. Of course, we need to decide, choose, and take a position in ethical space for ourselves, but this denotes not only the independence of the person but also his/her responsibility. Being responsible means that we are required to rationally respond when we are questioned about our actions or the motivation for our actions. In this sense, ethical deliberation is always a dialogic
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process where the person must reach out to others. Moral and ethical knowledge is jointly developed and actively achieved in responsive interaction (1999: 14). In other words, nding answers to the ethical question requires engagement in debates and argumentation. As MacIntyre states (1984: 110), moral communities therefore constitute public modes of ethical deliberation for the achievement of common and most valuable goods. In other words they represent traditions of argumentation constituted as an on-going extended argument about the goods. As MacIntyre (1984), Pandian (2008), Watson-Gegeo et al. (1990), and Demmer and Gaenszle (2007) attest, these ethical questions and the debates that arise constitute major parts of the social life of the person in many communities. Another major issue is how to conceptualise ethical agency when the two usual models of social action are not appropriate. To my mind the most compelling alternative model stems from John Shotter. It starts from the recognition outlined above that ethical actors are neither fully determined by external rules and norms nor fully free and self-determined. Instead, because ethical actors are responsible beings they must count with others and must also be accountable; their actions are evaluated and judged, and persons must be prepared to justify their actions if they are required to do so. If they fail, they are called to account for their actions, must answer to criticism, and under the threat of sanctions must be able to defend themselves. Moreover, all actors can fail in their commitments to moral standards. They can forget the standards, stray from them, or neglect them. Thus a good social life is always a precarious and open process. This open character gives all morally oriented social life the character of joint action (Shotter 1980), where actors who want to live well need to apply an ethical logistics: It is an ongoing formative process, where all actors have to interweave their own course of actions in with the unpredictable acts of others (Shotter 1993: 111). These processes can take the form of inner dialogue or of public deliberation and debate. Therefore, the ethical reasoner is basically a dialogic, argumentative, and rhetorical person. Finally, and similar to the anthropological standpoints outlined above, in the view of these authors practical reasoning also includes embodied and emotional processes. Thus Taylor views moral intuition (e.g. the sense of human dignity) as intrinsic to ethical orientation (1989: 18ff); MacIntyre considers practical reason to be deeply embedded in our feelings and the body such that moral agency is socially embodied (1984: 23 5). In fact, in his opinion (1999: 7 8), ethics is intrinsically bound to the body and experiences such as suffering and vulnerability; and
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Shotter observes that ethical deliberation even in its most basic from as joint action is a way of knowing in terms of feeling and feelings (1999: xi). Such feelings, says he, are of an ethical nature: they not only indicate what the others around us might or might not allow us to do [. . .] but also what it is about our own position for which we alone can be answerable (1999: xiii). In other words this process has a developmental nature [that] opens it up to a process of testing and checking, of justifying and warranting, of accrediting and legitimating (1999: xiiixiv). The most obvious circumstance in which such joint action occurs is in dialogue with others, when one must respond by formulating appropriate utterances in reply to their utterances (1999: 4). In the following sections I will explore whether these features of agent plus and practical reasoner are relevant for other cultural formations as well.10

Ethnographies of the Ethical Person

Bali In Bali the person is conceptualised as an ethical agent and a practical reasoner. As Uni Wikan shows, two components of the person are central (1987, 1990). One is that every human being has a life force called vayu. The other element is the heart, keneh, which is regarded as the site of ethical orientation, social memory, social evaluation, and moral decision-making. Vayu represents the forces of life and growth. It carries physical- and lifeenergy at large (for example, in the sense of enlivened agility) as well as mental and social attentiveness. It is also a vital energy owing in the blood, thought to permeate the whole of the body, and on which the physical existence of the person depends. Vayu is not a constant substance, but it can change, getting weaker or stronger. If it is strong, the person is physically durable; its movements are uid and well coordinated. A person with a strong vayu is observed as less vulnerable to illness and well protected against attacks of black magic. A strong vayu also impacts the emotional and mental condition as well as social conduct. As Wikan shows such a person is in a good mood, experiences life as energetic, is brave, calm, fresh and strong, and has a balanced mind (1990). A weak vayu, in contrast, makes the person vulnerable to illness as well as to black magic. Bad feelings and conduct can thus weaken the vayu as much as good behaviour can strengthen it (1989: 306). Anger, envy, or jealousy weakens the energy as much as excessive fear and sorrow (1989: 301). Moreover,
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negative emotions also diminish the life force of others (1989: 301 3). The life force of the person is thus endangered in multiple ways through social conduct that is interpreted as bad, but the person is also able to control and direct its moral orientation and behaviour in a good and nurturing way, in its own and in others interests. The key organ and site of moral orientation and ethical agency is the heart. According to Wikan, the heart not only enables the person to maintain its vital physical existence but also shapes the persons socio-moral orientation (1990: 35ff). This capability derives from the fact that in the heart, emotional and intellectual features are closely geared to each other. The heart encompasses sensual experience, the will (e.g. the act of forgetting as an act of will not to remember certain things), and the self-awareness of the person. All of these elements are integrated into a functional whole, the so-called ngabe keneh. This term connotes a process Wikan terms feeling-thought (1990) or what she calls managing the heart (1990). This is a type of ethical logistics, to take Shotters term, that is concerned with the strengthening of ones own life force and that of the social community at the same time. Managing the heart thus implies the active shaping of inner attitudes as well as the outward-oriented social conduct. Ideally, the heart is shaped in accordance with what Wikan regards as the key value of the Balinese ethos, the so-called polos (1987: 345 6, 1990: 73ff). Polos literally means smooth, gentle, convivial, and restraint but also being of one colour, which means even and unadulterated. In the context of everyday interaction, this amounts to being patient, not resisting openly, taking what one is offered, and taking negative or bad circumstances as they are. This ideal, then, demands the work of ethical agency and is an active achievement of ethical orientation executed by the person himself/herself. In Bali, this agency is taken to the extreme. Given that the good person is expected to be polos, such an individual must, for instance, forget or disregard acts of injustice. People state that one should not care about or should forget the bad (1989: 296 8). It also means maintaining emotions of calmness and even-mindedness even in situations of suffering. This ethical strategy culminates in the maxim to show a bright face (mue cedang), when in reality, the person is experiencing sorrow or painful distress. Such a person states to himself/herself, I dont care about it, it doesnt matter, it is all the same (1989) and also cultivates a generous attitude and treats others well, even when others speak ill of or mistreat the person. This person also displays a habitus of generosity: giving without expecting a return. Additionally he/she behaves modestly and not arrogantly, does not criticise others, and does not
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ridicule or mock anybody. Because not only anger but also emotions of sorrow or ill temper are regarded as immoral, these emotions weaken others and social ties, and managing the heart requires holding back or hiding such negatively evaluated, devastating emotions. To manage the heart and show happiness and a good mood, in contrast, can strengthen not only ones own and but also others vayu. To manage the heart, then, is a moral responsibility, as Wikan states (1989: 294). The concept of the person thus implies that ethical agency and good virtuous conduct is the outcome of on-going work on ones moral orientation and attitude. It is constituted, as it were, as an agent plus (Figure 1).
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Ifaluk The Ifaluk are shermen and peasants in Micronesia. They also conceptualise the person as an agent plus. Moral agency is located, however, not in the heart but in the Niferash, denoting the inner domain of human beings. Niferash encompasses physical organs, particularly in the heart, the liver, and digesting

Figure 1. The model of the person in Bali.

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organs, which in turn are related to the head and the brain. Beyond that, two subtle organs are located in the inner domain. They are conceived as faculties of socio-moral orientation and called nunuwan and tip. Nunuwan is associated with interactive/social aspects whilst tip relates to idiosyncratic processes such as the choice of good or bad attitudes and actions. Nunuwan has a physical, bodily sensual dimension and can be cold, cool, or hot, but it is also the site of emotions of sorrow, anger, fear, or longing and homesickness, the latter two of which are particularly important among Ifaluk. Finally, the nunuwan implies cognitive processes, attitudes, and ethical orientation, for instance, to take care of someone or being concerned of someone. As in the Balinese conception of managing the heart, the nunuwan combines emotional and cognitive processes into a faculty of thought/emotion, as Lutz characterises it (1988: 92). Moreover, nunuwan is closely tied with the moral dimension of sociality and the person. Accordingly, Lutz, states that the
Ifaluk see mental events as value-laden, ideally moral stances, and they do not, for this reason, separate evaluative and emotional responses from non-evaluative and cognitive responses to an environmental event. (1988: 92)

The nunuwan is also subject to evaluation about its good or bad quality. If ones nunuwan is bad, it means that one has bad thoughts or feelings, that one is unjustiably angry, seeking dominance, and so forth. People who are impatient or excessively angry are that way as Ifaluk state because their nunuwan isnt good (1988: 92). In contrast people who tease others and children who throw rocks at others do so because their nunuwan is bad, while a morally good person also has a good nunuwan. A bad nunuwan has signicant negative consequences for the person him/ herself as well as for others. A woman, for example, who is angry and quarrelsome for a long time is regarded to behave hotly and makes her child ill. Excessive sorrow, homesickness, and yearning are also interpreted as unsocial and immoral because they can lead to illness and agony, among other consequences, especially for those who maintain close interaction with such people. Accordingly, Lutz writes that the mental state of any mature individual is seen as having fundamentally social roots. Others can then be held responsible for the social conditions that produce the state (1988: 101). Consequently, claiming to be justiably angry is the rst step in a process of negotiating the meaning of other peoples actions in relation to oneself.

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In summary, what Western thinking regards as inner feelings, emotions, and attitudes always has a social dimension; they are never completely private. Bad emotions and attitudes can also devastate the person himself/herself because they are thought to lead to illness and weakness, for instance. The concept of the inner domain as it is conceived in the unity of nunuwan implies a close nexus of emotional, cognitive, and physical conditions. Excessive emotions are therefore not only regarded as immoral but also as dangerous for the person him/herself. A person with good attitudes and emotions, in contrast, will have a lot of nunuwan and therefore good health and wellness. In addition, this persons good attitudes affect his/her own nunuwan, as well. Against this background, it becomes clear how important for the Ifaluk the maintenance of moral orientation is. As in the other cases discussed above, good ethical orientation is of existential signicance for the person. To achieve such good orientations, the tip, a more individual-idiosyncratic faculty, supports the nunuwan. Depending on the context, tip can be translated as will, desire, wish, or thought. Similar to the nunuwan, it thus combines emotional and cognitive aspects. In contrast to nunuwan, tip implies functions pointing to idiosyncratic aspects of the person and to its work of moral orientation without opposing, however, the normative social world and its rules. Tip, then, implies the choice for or against ones moral attitudes, ones emotion-thought and conduct. It also ascribes the responsibility for attitudes and actions to the actor itself. The active commitment to the ethical standards of the community is one of the main features of the tip. The person is not acting automatically nor is his/her behaviour externally determined by rules or norms, but he/she must choose and evaluate how to think and act. An important function of the tip with respect to these aspects is what is called dividing the head (Gish si gamaku chimwash. 1988: 97). This is an activity whereby a person is actively working upon his/her mind to establish and cultivate good ethical orientations, attitudes, and behaviour. This requires undoing socially damaging feelings and thoughts. A range of cultural strategies is known to achieve that end. One, for instance, is called ridding oneself of unpleasant and disruptive thought/emotions (Lutz 1988: 97). If a person becomes aware of his/her bad nunuwan, it feels as if his/her head were separated into two halves. Such a person should then separate the good and the bad, divide his/her head, and get rid of the bad nunuwan. All these practices should prevent bad nunuwan and tip from damaging the self and others. Analytically speaking, the Ifaluk employ various procedures to achieve a good personal moral orientation. Of particular relevance is the use of
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socio-moral interpretive schemata. Ifaluk interpret events and social conduct in terms of moral evaluations and assessments. Whether actions are successful and whether goals are achieved is, in contrast, less important. As Lutz observes, the world is not explained or narrated in value-free terms but primarily in ethical terms. The evaluations being used are part of the value system, and they require the active application of cultural schemata, concepts, and socio-moral scenarios (cf. Fillmore 77). Such scenarios enable persons to associate certain patterns of conduct with culturally dened schemes of events and serve to evaluate events appropriately. The Ifaluk use a number of schemes, including the concept fago, which enables the orientation and evaluation of love, grief, or pity; the concept metagu, used to interpret social respect, modesty, and fear; and the concept song, used to evaluate when just anger is appropriate or not. Moral schemata, such as song, serve to morally direct or motivate social actions because the ability to have or express song also implies the ability to anticipate the possible response to ones own conduct. Following this scheme, it becomes obvious that the anticipation of song is, as Lutz argues, one of the key factors in the maintenance of the ethical order and praxis in the community. Good conduct among the Ifaluk, therefore, implies the permanent application of moral attentiveness, a kind of reexive self-control, as Lutz terms it (1988: 161). In other words, the person is always and essentially an agent plus, necessarily observed as an evaluating actor/thinker using cultural horizons to ethically direct and evaluate his/her own and others ways of conducting themselves and living. Moreover, participation in ethical discourse and the involvement in the narrative activities that are vital parts of disentangling meetings are essential for the ethical person (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The model of the person among the Ifaluk.

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The Gurung In Nepal, the Gurung, a peasant community in the eastern part of the country, also conceptualise the person as an agent plus. As portrayed in McHughs studies (2001, 1989), this community cultivates an ethos of social (kin-based) solidarity and cooperation. The group provides its individuals security, belonging and the promise of well being, McHugh writes, and also in praxis, sharing, hospitality, and cooperation are practised to a considerable extent (1989: 78). Being neatly tied into the community also has a less positive aspect; however, in everyday life expectations and demands for goods, food, or help are so frequent that even the most generous giver and social person is overstressed by these tasks. Moreover, the Gurung cannot deny these claims openly because this would be regarded as crude and unsocial behaviour. This, McHugh writes, ultimately leads to the view among the Gurung that social relations are not only prosperous and good but also instable and fragile. One consequence of the fragility of the social domain is that the Gurung practice social and moral attentiveness to a high degree. While they are extremely suspicious and doubt the reliability of others, they are also permanently concerned with upholding their positive ethical orientation not least because there exists a wide variety of means to magically take revenge on transgressors with potentially life-threatening consequences. Social integration is thus essential in an existential sense: without it one is likely to get weak, sicken, or even die. This tension between social conformity and the limits or needs of the individual or, in other words, between dependency and autonomy is clearly reected in the Gurung concept of the person. To the Gurung, a human being consists of essentially two socially relevant components, the plah and the sae. Plah denotes the life forces or souls of the person. Every human being has between seven and nine plah, ne substances that invigorate the body. Their strength and consistency, however, depend upon the quality of the social relatedness of the person. Sudden fright or psychic shock induced by bad social relations can cause the life forces to evade the body, leading to illness or even death. Regaining the plah is only possible, in turn, through good social relationships with kin because it is solely the latter that can perform the rites of healing that are necessary to reestablish the plah. However, the plah does not represent an organ of the mind or of ethical orientation for behaviour. That faculty is associated with the so-called sae.

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The sae is located in the centre of the chest and has the function of a sociomoral mind or of ethical reason. It is the organ of social memory, of social experience, and of emotions in addition to that of individual decision-making, social evaluation and, therefore, of social self-control and ethical orientation. Like the plah, the sae is also vulnerable and endangered. In contrast to the plah, however, the individual person itself can directly impact the quality of its sae. A human being who cultivates good social relationships, who carries out his/her duties, who is friendly and, at the same time, moderate in judgement, has a large and prospering sae. In addition, such a persons ability to ourish is maintained through virtuous behaviour. The sae is endangered, however, through poor social conduct. A human being who is inattentive to the needs of others, one who is selsh, or one who is too strict in his/her evaluation of the conduct of others experiences the diminishment of the sae; the person becomes socially weak, and eventually his/her well-being is under threat. Isolating oneself socially, such a person provokes magical vengeance and, because of his/her weakened sae, is threatened with the loss of the plah, his/her life forces. The Gurung model of the person accordingly combines two aspects social conformity and individual agency to shape, or at least modify, its behaviour and social relationships. The person is not a machine that acts automatically or is determined by rules, nor is he/she fully free and self-determined. Rather, both features social dependency and personal autonomy with respect to behaviour and value orientation are related in cultural as well as in tense and even dilemmatic ways. The dilemma is found in the fact that actors cannot avoid both aspects and must decide how to act; they must be aware of the social and existential consequences of their actions to stay healthy and prosper. This underscores the existential need to use ones ethical faculty for practical reasoning, to be attentive to cultural interpretations, and to negotiate for oneself how to appropriately act ethically in social space. Ethical agency, one might say, is indispensable in a very existentially way, required for survival, so to speak (Figure 3).

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Lohurung The Lohurung Rai of Nepal articulate a similar concept. As Hardman (1981) shows, they conceptualise the same two aspects of ethical agency, namely sociality or social orientation, on the one hand, and individual evaluation and selfdirection of social conduct, on the other hand. The Lohurung Rai distinguish three organs or substances of the person: lawa, saya, and niwa. Lawa is the
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Figure 3. The Gurung model of the person.

life force or life essence permeating the whole human body. As a vital life force, it is not constant, but depending on the ethical conduct and attitude of the person, it can become stronger or weaker and eventually might even leave the body and lead to death. Its quality depends on the interplay of the other two organs, saya and niwa. The saya is located in the head and is regarded as a substance closely tied to the social legacy of the person. Its quality stems from the ancestors, the persons clan and kin or family. Accordingly, a person is born equipped with a certain saya, with respective dignity, pride, and organic vitality. It needs to be strengthened periodically, however, through specic rituals; if these are not performed, the saya weakens, the person loses his/her dignity, disregarding his/her social status through his/her behaviour, and gradually the saya becomes unable to hold or bind properly to the lawa within the body; the person becomes ill or even dies. The saya does not work alone but is closely tied to the niwa, an organ usually located in the stomach or in the centre of the body. Its functions combine social, collective, and individual aspects. In contrast, it is similar to the Gurung sae, a kind of ethical mind or moral consciousness. It enables the person to distinguish what is good and what is bad and how to choose the appropriate mode of conduct. According to Hardman, the niwa enables the person to control his/ her thinking and appropriate behaviour.
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In addition, the Lohurung conceptualise the so-called Tangpam Niwa, translated by Hardman as a personal or individual type of niwa. This, she says, enables actors to individually shape deviations from ideal or normative conduct, which is not regarded as wrong, bad, or unsocial, but as being within the acceptable range of individual behaviour. In addition, the Tangpam Niwa is associated with non-conformist expressions of personal viewpoints, with personal wishes, inclinations, and feelings (Hardman 1981: 177). Yet, as Hardman writes, the individual niwa is relevant mainly in the private realm of the person. Niwa is therefore signicant in contexts of more informal social circumstances where behaviour is not as strictly controlled as it is in public interaction. As her ethnography shows, behaviour in public space is also occasionally justied with reference to niwa; for example, in the case of two unmarried sisters who, against all social conventions, ploughed their eld themselves, a task considered to be mens work. Because the sisters were driven by necessity and had no choice, however, their conduct was interpreted as being motivated by niwa and thus not observed as wrong, although it did not conform to the rules. In summary, the Lohurung also conceptualise both social conformity and individual agency as aspects of the moral person. Their concept entails the value orientation and self-direction of behaviour as well as the culturally specic interpretations they rest upon, while underscoring the existential necessity of both processes as essential to the well-being of the person (Figure 4).

Jenu Kurumba Among the Jenu Kurumba of South India the person has also many features of a practical reasoner. First of all, the Jenu Kurumba model of the person concep-

Figure 4. The Lohurung model of the person.

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tualises the dilemmatic nature of the human being recognising, on the one hand, his/her dependency on the social-cultural environment and, on the other hand, his/her autonomy as a moral actor. It also acknowledges the interpretative, evaluative, dialogic, and existential features of the person as outlined above. On the most general level, the person is constituted in a twofold manner: as a physical being and as a ne-graded mental being (cf. Demmer 2007, 2008). The physical being consists of the physical body and endures over a lifetime, deteriorates after death, and is affected by illness and bad health. However, the person is also a mental being, who endures after death with all his/her faculties, such as speech, memory, feelings, and consciousness or mind. The mental being is called nelalu, which literally means shade. It is understood to be a kind of invisible cloak enfolding the body and continuing to exist after death. It actually represents what, in Western terms, we would call the key features of the person, namely, mind, intellect, consciousness, moral orientation, feelings, attitudes, social memory, and forgetting, among others. These features are associated with three organs. The head, or buddi, is the site of the intellect and instrumental rationality. The mansu, located roughly where we situate the physical heart, is said to be the site of the faculties of will, ethical deliberation, moral orientation, ethical decisions to act, social attentiveness, and social memory. The third organ is termed otte, or what we would call the stomach and is the site of emotions and feelings. The heat of illness, pain, or anger, along with the coolness of peaceful sociality, happiness, or comfort are said to be in the otte. It is also the seat of ones life force (sakti) as well as of physical/mental vitality and strength (bala). Mansu and otte are closely interdependent or interacting. If a person expresses many bad social memories, for example, he/she will feel bad in the otte, or if one is angry for an inappropriately long time, the otte will become hot. Those bad feelings and emotions will also affect the mansu (ones mind). The mansu, people say, will become bad like a rotting fruit and will make the otte become bad in turn. Finally, both organs are also closely related to the social environment and practised social relationships. If one is overly angry with others, these people may become ill, ones own mind may become bad, and ones otte (stomach) will start to burn or feel pain. In contrast, a good mind is said to be calm or shady if one is thinking well of others or if one is sharing food and other things freely. A persons otte is then said to be cool or fresh (green, acce), as is the otte of the beneciaries as well. If overdone, however, others might become jealous, and their otte will become hot or burn, their mind and moral orientation will become bad or even rot, and so on. To live the
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Figure 5. The Je nu Kurumba model of the person.

ideal life one that is good and pleasant, peaceful and calm, shady and cool, and so on one must maintain a good mansu (cf. Demmer 2007). This is achieved through constantly reminding oneself of the benets of a good mind and its cultivation that is, thinking well of others, sharing with others, and helping those in need, such as ones elderly parents, grandparents, close kin, etc. To live virtuously as much as possible is thus one key to staying healthy. The precondition for both of these objectives is the participation in the most important ritual performances of the community. The rituals involve extensive debates concerned with critical moments in life, particularly with illness and death. They consist to a large extent of what is called the talks, the conversations or words of what is good and bad (lolledu kettadu ma ttu), which serve as __ contexts where the ethical mind and the moral person are constituted through dynamic processes of narration, social memory, and ethical discourse. Engaged participation and active involvement in these debates do two things simultaneously. First, they enable actors to achieve their identity as ethical beings, without which they could not survive, either suffering illness or even death, through the performance of good ways of living together. Second, such good living is poetically imagined and worked out through dialogue and debate (cf. Demmer 2007). It is in the context of ritual discourse that correct good orientation (a good mansu) is acquired, maintained, and renewed in the course of conversation and dialogue with shamans. In other words, personal crises, such as illness and death, require the social reconstruc-

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tion of the moral person through participation in debate, dialogue, and conversation. In the course of these activities, the life history of the individual and its moral biography are disputed and discussed. The narrative reconstruction of the person that results entails the discussion of the clients responsibilities, commitments to ethical values, recognition of the moral order, and vision of a good life. In short, the moral person is socially constructed. What is achieved here is nothing less than the competence of ethical agency itself through engaged realisation.11 We encounter the main rituals of the Je nu Kurumba as arenas where actors are engaged in ethical deliberation and argumentation. This procedure not only requires good arguments and the will to follow an ethical mode of life but also emotional, narrational, and reexive engagement. It also demands that the cultural background and the meaningful resources available to speakers and actors at that time be drawn upon. To poetically imagine and rhetorically defend or argue for what is observed as the really good and bad requires all faculties that we associate with a practical reasoner. The person thus learns and realises what it means to be an agent plus (Figure 5). Conclusion All cultural formations explored in this paper conceptualise the person as an agent plus or practical reasoner. They postulate a close relationship between personal well-being, ethical orientation, the quality of relationships within the community, and personal identity. All of these aspects are observed as indivisibly interwoven in that the person must cultivate its ethical orientation in a very existential sense: without this ethical engagement, people suffer or even become sick, and the community, to use Je nu Kurumba words here, rots. This engagement implies that the person is, to a certain extent, independent and free: he/she is not acting automatically but must choose how to conduct himself/herself and select which values to follow. Yet, the subject is also dependent on ethical resources as well as on others. Moreover, the individual is responsible for his/her deeds, is held responsible, and must participate in discourses about the ethics of the community. The person, therefore, must continuously employ an ethical logistics, as it were, to attain a proper ethical orientation and his/her appropriate position in ethical space. All concepts of ethical personhood presented in this paper also assume that individuals are interpreting social events and behaviours and that they are able to reexively evaluate strongly human desires, objectives, and ways of life as to their desirableness. These processes entail the use of narrativity, imagination, social memory,
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and emotional schemes. Thought and feeling are therefore integral to the ethical mind. Furthermore, the above activities unfold in dialogic engagement. The ethical person has to deliberate and argue out through inner dialogue or through ` -vis others and public debate which stance he/she wants to take vis-a within the value sphere or the moral space as such. Thus, in every respect, the person is observed as a dialogic self, permanently and necessarily involved in a kind of responsive engagement with, as the Je nu Kurumba state, what is good or bad.12 All of these concepts also underscore that actors actively use and relate to the cultural resources, ethical horizons, and moral ontologies available to them. Drawing on them in dialogic engagement enables the person to strongly evaluate how to live and what is bad and good. Finally, the person is also regarded as fallible so that his/her moral orientation and ethical identity are always at stake. Accordingly, the agency of the ethical person appears as a complex process that should not simply be conned to, as Sykes holds (2012: 182), the navigation of commonplace contradictions of daily life without resolving or eliminating the paradox between self-interest and altruism, worth and wealth, or sentiment and reason, to cite the examples of Sykes (2012: 178). Furthermore, ethical agency is not restricted to the extraordinary moments Zigon calls breakdown (2007). It is true that such moments demand the intensied reection and explicit articulation of values and moral positions so that ethical agency is peculiarly visible, to use Faubions (2010: 20) words. However, we use practical reason also when we lead our lives ethically in the course of our daily activities. It is always at hand, so to say. Moreover, it is important to note that engaged practical reasoning does not posit a highly reective and overly rational evaluator as the model for an ethical person. Once we recognise that we are not concerned with abstract or theoretical reason we can realise that engaged practical reason is quite ordinary and part of our everyday conduct and ethical engagement. In this realist understanding of ethics everybody is able to not only articulate but also to defend or reject ideas of how to live good. On the other hand, according to the communities studied in this article, ethical reasoning is certainly more complex than Foucaults concepts of thought and problematisation. Ethical agency entails strong evaluation and its existential bearing on personal identity; however, neither of these aspects plays a role in Foucaults understanding of ethics. Foucault explicitly states (1997: 291) that the ethical subject merely reproduces the ethical models imposed upon him by his culture and thus does not need to
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make strong personal evaluations. Furthermore, considering Foucaults wellknown concept of the subject, moral orientation is not essential for the person; thus, personal identity in this ethical sense is not a relevant concept for the poststructuralist tradition. For the above-mentioned (and additional) reasons, Mattingly writes that although a Foucauldian approach to ethics affords many insights, it comes with serious costs. In particular, the complexities of motive, moral deliberation, and moral creativity, especially as elements of ordinary life, are difcult to discern or are even dismissed altogether (Mattingly 2012: 177). By contrast, the concepts studied in this article postulate the existence of this complexity and the close relationship between all of the elements outlined above. As the analysis shows the person achieves moral orientation through orchestrating processes of imagination, thinking, classifying, feeling, and even sensation. Finally, all of the communities assume an existential urge to engage dialogically in moral deliberation and to articulate a moral horizon as an indispensable aspect of the human condition. It follows that in order to pursue a good life, ethical engagement appears as an existential task without which human life would hardly be possible.
Acknowledegments I am deeply indebted to the research foundations and institutions which made my long-term eld research and academic work possible over the years. The German Research Foundation, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, the Government of India (Ministry of Education), the German Academic Exchange Service and the University of Munich provided indispensable nancial and/or administrative support. I thank my colleague Frank Heidemann, the anonymous reviewers for Ethnos, as well as the editors, for comments that led to important revisions. Notes 1. We still have no explicit anthropological studies on how practical reason is conceived in anthropology. I investigate this issue and the other above-mentioned forms of reason in Demmer (2013). 2. There is no shortage of studies on the person in anthropology. Yet, explicit explorations of the ethical person and its agency have so far been neglected. For example, Harris (1989) summarises the discussion by distinguishing among three different ideas of the person, namely, (1) the person as representative of a specic class or species, i.e. as a human being distinct from the classes of animals or gods, (2) the person as the site of experience and self-identity or what is often called the self, and (3) the person as social actor in society and community. The notion of the ethical person transcends these divisions. The studies in Carrithers et al. (1985) focus on the categories of the individual and the social person as inhabitants of social roles and on the probable differences between these two categories. Only ethnos, 2013 (pp. 1 26)

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the chapters by Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre deal with the ethical person. Other work focuses on certain aspects of the person as social self, for example, as the site of experience, emotions, and social status. Miller et al. (1990) and Mageo (1995), for example, represent studies concerning the narrative and discursive construction of the social self. 3. See Mattingly (2012) for a discussion of Neo-Aristotelian (and Foucauldian) approaches to ethics. 4. This paper concerns the general features of ethical agency. This does not mean that questions of social positioning, gender, and power play no role; however, appropriately addressing these issues is beyond the scope of this work. 5. I conducted almost 10 years of eldwork among the Jenu Kurumba between the years 1987 and 2011. 6. Practical reason as it is understood in the present paper is not a strictly cognitive faculty like abstract or theoretical reason but a complex process of ethical orientation. Another important thrust of research is therefore concerned with that complexity in terms of processes, such as embodiment, habitual orientation, affect, or moral sentiment (cf. Throop 2010, 2012; Zigon 2011; Mattingly 2012). It is important to recognise, however, that these features of ethical experience and conduct are not per se opposed to the specic engaged type of practical reason we are concerned with in the present article. As will be demonstrated throughout this article the engaged type of reason does include emotional and existential experiences, for instance. However, showing how the orchestration of embodiment, habitus, and discourse-based practical reason is achieved in all its dimensions is beyond the scope of the present paper. It remains an important task for anthropological research. I thank one anonymous reviewer for pointing those issues out. 7. I must conne myself to the central features described in the literature. A comprehensive treatment of this topic exceeds the scope of this article and is presented elsewhere (Demmer 2013). 8. Zigon (2007), Hirschkind (2006), and Mahmood (2005) refer to problematisation as well. 9. Zigon (2007, 2009) and, as Fassin (2012: 8) points out, Robbins (e.g. 2007, 2012) also struggle with that polarity without, however, overcoming it. They hold that both types of action are relevant though at different times (Zigon) or in particular contexts (Robbins). 10. I have selected only some cultures for analysis. Data on the Yupno (Keck 2005), for example, could have been included in addition to the ndings of Myers (1990), White (1990), and Rosaldo (1984). 11. Lambek also observes that rituals not only represent but also realise ethics and the idea of a good life, at least temporarily (Lambek 2000: 314). Fernandez conrms that idea as well when he states that metaphors or allegories of morality are taken literally and become real experience (Fernandez 1986: 42). 12. The Kallar in South India also engage in ethical discourses on the good and bad (cf. Pandian 2009). Moreover, it seems that they conceptualise the person in terms of an agent plus. The Kallar man who Pandian interviewed for his article (2010) uses terms the Je nu Kurumba also employ (e.g. manasu or buddhi). The interviews also demonstrate that the man deliberates morally, endows ethical values with a

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poetic quality, derives his judgements through engagement with cultural resources, and evaluates strongly. However, Pandian does not detail how the person is conceptualised; therefore, we cannot discern whether the concept as a whole corresponds to the agent plus. It should also be noted that despite Pandians reasonable critique of Taylors approach to the interior self, there is an ontological element to Taylors work. My arguments in this article build on this ontological dimension of Taylors work. Mattingly (2012) provides a very useful reading on this issue. The term realist stems from Taylor (1989) who, for these reasons, calls his approach ethical realism.

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